If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

The Great Recession and the very slow pace of subsequent recovery has sky-rocketed unemployment, as well as people on welfare and food stamps. A record high of 15 percent, or 46.37 million Americans, were on food stamps in June last year — that's almost one in every seven Americans. That number is not expected to come down much without a significant improvement in the unemployment picture.
Even worse, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The number of people with graduate degrees — master's degrees and doctorates — who have had to apply for food stamps, unemployment or other assistance more than tripled between 2007 and 2010. Of the 22 million Americans with master's degrees or higher in 2010, about 360,000 were receiving some kind of public assistance, according to the latest Current Population Survey released by the U.S. Census Bureau in March 2011.

9. Siiiiiiigh. So I guess "working harder" is no longer enough; you now have to be a fortune teller.

Shouldn't people be able to make a living at what they want to do? How does this square with the laws of diminishing returns?

Ug. Facepalm.

Actually, didn't Pelosi recently say that now that no one will have to pay for health insurance you are free to go and write shitty poetry and make piss art so you can do what you want to do and not have to worry about certain expenses.

Imagine if we all did only what we wanted to do for a living. I know professional baseball would be filled with a boatload of crappy pitchers. I'd be one of them.

Well, perhaps if their PHD wasn't in 15th Century Polish Existentialism they'd have an easier time using it. However, I'd be willing to bet having a PHD in business they'd be doing well.

You're right-there are useless PhD degrees and useful ones. A PhD in Engineering is pretty useful, as is a PhD in Psychology (court evaluations can be lucrative once one has enough experience to be an independent contractor).

The real story of the article is that the kind of welfare that PhDs are on has changed from subsidies and grants filtered through the education bureaucracy to direct payments through a social service agency. After decades of basically paying them to study fields in which nobody but them and a few like-minded navel gazers have an interest, and which have no practical applications, delaying the onset of adult responsibilities into what we used to consider middle age, we now make a distinction between the paid perpetuation of their academic fantasies and the welfare payments that we give them when those fantasies prove to have provided no marketable job skills. The British riots that occurred a couple of years ago when the tuition at public colleges was slightly raised were incomprehensible as a protest against alleged government indifference to education, but if you look at them as welfare recipients rioting over getting a benefit cut, it makes much more sense. The PhDs in the article are not suddenly on welfare, they're simply changing how they get it and what they call it.

You're right-there are useless PhD degrees and useful ones. A PhD in Engineering is pretty useful, as is a PhD in Psychology (court evaluations can be lucrative once one has enough experience to be an independent contractor).

Why would a school offer a PhD in Medievel Basket Weaving or some other useless field of pseudo-knowledge if they weren't receiving a ton of money to do so?